When you’ve been to the brink, to almost-death, to you can see it from here without binoculars, it changes you.In the beginning, it is overwhelming. The world is overwhelming. In the beginning, I was regularly brought to the brink of tears by a perfect pepper, by the sun shining through a leaf, constantly reminded of the astonishing miracle that is living. In the beginning, you're just happy to be alive. Each day is a gift you receive with gratitude, the knowledge that you almost didn't have it, almost missed the rain, this moment of your cat purring on your lap, this opportunity to talk with someone you love. In the beginning, you live in the now, not just because you're still recovering and gathering strength, but because the now is all there is, filling all your senses.And then you start seeing your life not just in days, but weeks, too. You get a little stronger, you start making plans with friends for a week or two down the road, knowing that you can. Knowing that you…

To start us off, what part of spring are you (via Barbara from Nova Scotia)?You Are Baseball GamesYou like old fashioned things. You're one of those people who values tradition.You enjoy a slow pace of life. You believe that life is all about enjoying every moment.You love the changing of the seasons, and you look forward to what each season brings.You are smart and a bit obsessive. You become very immersed in your interests.What Part of Spring Are You?(enjoy a slow pace of life? Me?? Although that thing about being a bit obsessive may be sort of true...)LynnM sent me hilarious tourist complaints and a comparison of warriors in two cultures.Who knew a garden hose could sound melodic?From Trevor, the absolutely latest from Japan and I've got no comment whatsoever. And an article refuting the innocence of "little old ladies" (people keep forgetting they've had decades to plot).Trevor also sent me a link to two talking cats - really talking, although it doesn't …

This week on HealthCentral, it's about inspiration, dreams and rebuilding your life:

"I don't have a choice of whether or not I have Parkinson's: I have it. But other than that, I have a thousand choices, and I can't let myself be sunk by the weight of that one non-choice..." - Michael J. Fox, Entertainment Weekly, April 17, 2009"

This weekend, it was warm. Not just not freezing, but actual warmth. Going out into the sunshine, I meandered through the neighborhood and saw buds, tiny leaves working their way out, leaving a delicate green tinge on branches that have been dead for months. Life is coming back.In a raised flower bed that is someone's downtown garden, the tree is still dormant, but below, dotting the flat, grey earth are tiny blue flowers. I don't know what kind they are, but it doesn't matter - they are joy.I turn a corner and the delicate scent of manure comes toward me on the breeze - somewhere, someone has been gardening and after six months of smelling nothing but cold and snow and exhaust, this smells like green to come, smells of promise. Inside of me, something tight is starting to let go.I pass a tulip and then another one, bright yellow and red bouncing off my retina, my eyes unused to such exuberance after half a year of monochrome and I drink it in, can feel the colour entering…

I read this post a while back and have been keeping it in my back pocket for pondering. It's about the Celtic legend of Ceridwen’s magic potion granting knowledge and wisdom and the punishment of Gwion for accidentally imbibing it. I like the musings about knowledge and wisdom and why it is apparently a bad thing, just like the story of the Garden of Eden And aside from a theological conundrum - which I won't get into now, as I'm trying to for once keep this short due to elbow issues - it got me thinking about the early days of Christianity. About masses being in Latin, about requiring a priest as a conduit between the people and God and I started wondering about all these barriers that were erected to keep the congregation unknowing. Aside from this being an excellent method of social control, was it to preserve the "innocence" of people? And why is innocence so praised? Which naturally led me to the good old saying about ignorance being bliss. With which I disa…

Remember this injury? That turned permanent? It even has a name now – thought of Priscilla, Celia or Brunhilde, but instead, it’s apparently a variant of Golfer’s Elbow and all without even playing that pointless game. It got aggravated. In fact, it got downright testy and has gotten progressively worse on a weekly basis for quite a while now to the point where I had to take most of last week off to sit fairly still in the hopes of preventing something major. Of course, by the time I sat still, it was too late and it turned into one of those cascading injury things, where one thing leads to another and before you know it, your entire body is fucked.Yes, this again. I'm running out of ways of describing it in an interesting/amusing manner. Am I the only one bored with the subject? (don’t answer that!)Anyway! Just before the long weekend hit, I decided to drag out the big guns and had a chat to my doctor about a steroid shot. Which brings me (finally) to my point. Assuming I even ha…

"I used to start the day with crying in the shower, hiding my face under the spray, silent tears of pain mixing with the water. Once the day got going, I'd build up the barricades again and distance myself from the pain, but in those first moments after waking, my soul was too raw and tender to take the assault. Every morning, I felt the full impact of my illness, the pain too much to bear, the despair of facing yet another day like this overwhelming."

On Monday, Colleen called me on using the term Nazi for something unrelated to the Third Reich and its horrors and rightly so.I should know better.People like me were the first to be gassed by the Nazis back when they were still doing it with exhaust fumes because it was easy to persuade others that people with disabilities weren’t really human and would contaminate the Aryan race. I should know better because my parents were children during the German occupation of Denmark and I grew up hearing stories about that.Not just from my parents, but also from the annual commemoration of the occupation and liberation, which included documentaries about the camps. Which was the reason Schindler's List didn't affect me the same way it seemed to have affected the rest of North America. I had watched documentaries about the reality and once you've seen those images, they don't leave your mind and dramatizations lose their effectiveness. But my point is not about movies. My point …

Along with a good portion of other people in the Internet, I read Dooce and sometime last year, when Heather started doing momversations with other prominent mommy bloggers, I started watching that, too. They're smart, funny women with interesting takes on issues of parenting and despite not being a parent, not surprisingly, I have opinions anyway. The older I get, the more I'm aware of how I was parented has shaped some of the best parts of me and I am lucky enough to have been elected co-parent of two amazing boys, which has made me think even more about the ways we parent. And I find it pretty funny that I feel compelled to justify being about to opine about parenting, but it's a bit of a sticky issue, isn't it? For people who don't have children to have an opinion about raising them. However! This blog is about me having opinions, so here goes.One of the recent momversations was about family dinners, about having them, not having them, why we think they’re impo…

This is to distract you from the absence of my regular verbosity. Two deadlines today, plus a meeting requiring major prep and... look! The shiny shininess! Shining upon what I hope are shiny, happy people about to have a shiny weekend. Words to return Monday.

I could write pages about the awesome woman who is my mother, but this photo sort of says it all. Warm, wise, strong and with a highly developed sense of the ridiculous, she is my rock and my inspiration.

I have this notion that it could be fun for her to get as many birthday wishes as her age - 74 today - and to that end, I'm having a contest. Leave a comment for the Birthday Goddess, (who goes by the name of Bea) anytime between now and Sunday evening at 6pm. Winner to be selected randomly by aforementioned Birthday Goddess, announced on Monday and gets an 8x10 print of any photo on my Flickr page.